When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it?
This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.
Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking.
In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.

Преподаватели

Ian Shapiro

Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director

Текст видео

To keep things relatively simple, so we can just get, get a grip on what, what's at stake. Imagine a worker works for ten hours. Now Marx is going to say a few things about it. First of all, we will remember from our last discussion that what determines the wages of the worker has nothing to do with the value of what the worker is producing, right? This is the commonest mistake that people make in trying to understand Marx. It's nothing to do with the value of what the worker's producing but what it costs to produce the worker. Right? The worker is a commodity like everything else. For Marx everything in a capitalist system is a commodity. In this sense he's an extreme thinker in a way that Bentham is an extreme thinker. He said he takes one idea and pushes it to the hilt. Everybody is a commodity, okay? So the workers wage is what it costs to produce the worker. Now, a second assumption. And actually it turns out to be one of the few assumptions Marx made that does well. It turns out to be valid. Marx assumes wages will always tend towards subsistence. Why? Because there are always unemployed people. He assumes, he calls it the reserve army of the proletariat. There always unemployed people. That means if I, you refuse to work at a subsistence wage I can go out and hire somebody else and fire you right, so wages are driven toward subsistence. And that's a kind of inescapable fact about capitalism, and as I said it's one of the few empirical assumptions Marx made that turns out to do pretty well. As a descriptive matter. Okay, so wages are going to be at subsistence and it's just going to be the cost of producing the laborer at, at the minimal wage. Now you might say, well, what determines subsistence? And that he thinks, can change over time. So obviously, if we're talking about Victorian Britain, it's different than suburban America. And it may be the case that in suburban America, having enough money to be able to afford to buy a car to get to work will become priced into the notion of subsistence. so that's what it means when Marx says that concept of subsistence is socially and historically conditioned. So he thinks it can change, but still, in all, there's going to be some minimum that you can be paid to do that job. And wages are going to tend toward that minimum and the existence of the unemployed out there will keep it at that minimum. Okay? Other things equal. So in my little example here we have a ten hour working day and Marx says let's suppose that it takes four hours for the worker to produce goods. Let's say this is the cotton industry, to produce cotton. That once that cotton is eventually sold will cover his or her wage bill. Okay, what we last, last lecture referred to as the variable capital. The capital the money the capitalist spends on wages. Okay? So you're working for ten hours but after the first four hours, the capitalists is getting enough surplus by consuming your labor power. Remember the capitalist is buying your labor power and consuming it, and this is the labor theory of surplus value. That's where the value comes from, right? Consumed enough of your labor power to pay you at subsistence wage. The next six, is what Marx calls your surplus labor time, right? Producing surplus value. Now is that same, is that the capitalist's profit? Would you say? Is that the, the, that's six hours, is that profit? >> The profit's in there, but it's not all of it. >> Right, because the capitalist has other costs, right? Research and development, rent, insurance, you name it. All those costs. So, it's the not six hours of, of value, work producing value, that's all going to be profit, but as you said, profit is in there. Okay, and what Marx wants to say is we can think about that as the, the ratio of surplus to necessary labor time. That's what he means, when he says, the rate of exploitation. You can actually compute it. It's, the ratio is 6 to 4, it's and you could say, you could turn it into an index, an exploitation index of 1.5. I'll come back to those numbers later, okay? Now. So you, so here we are, we're in the cotton industry. My workers are working a ten hour day and producing surplus for six hours and some sub set of that we don't know exactly what is the capitalist's profit. Plus their other fixed costs and, and so on and all thrown in there. Okay, now. What are capitalists most afraid of? >> Of workers? >> Of what? >> Of workers. >> Of workers. >> Yeah. >> Well, that's a, also very reasonable thing to say, after all this is a theory of class conflict, capitalists engaged in, in exploiting workers on this theory. So it's reasonable to think that capitalists would be afraid of workers. But it, but remember that Marx has got a, a theory of a capitalist system and he, he, he's tried to look at it from the point of view of a capitalist. Suppose you're a capitalist in the cotton industry. Do you really think the thing that would worry you most is your work, your workers, especially if there were unemployed workers out there? That you, you going to, you could fire them anytime if they got uppity. >> [LAUGH] Just hire more. >> Yeah. >> No, I think my biggest fear would be not covering my costs, becoming unviable. >> How would you, what would make you unviable? That is right, but, what is, how, what is, when a capitalist is in a business. They're constantly looking over their shoulder. Who are they looking at? What are they looking for? >> Competition. >> Competition. Exactly, this is a model, just like the Pareto system, this is a model of a perfectly competitive economy, right? And so, think about it. You're in the cotton business. You're, you've got these workers. There are unemployed workers out there, right? Why wouldn't somebody come along to those unemployed workers, who are on the verge of starvation. There's, there's no welfare state in this model. Right? This is 19th century capitalism with the gloves off. Right? And say to these unemployed worker's, I'll hire you. We'll go into the cotton business the only thing is. It's not a ten hour day. It's an 11 hour day. Sorry. >> Mm-hm. >> And then you say well, but they're working a 10 hour day there. Say well, take it or leave it. >> Mm-hm. >> Take it or leave it. Okay, you're going to starve. Otherwise, you'll take it. Okay, so now we have two firms. Okay, and everything is identical. The wage bill is still covered in the first four hours because wages are subsistence right? The wage has nothing to do with the fact that in the second case what I'm calling b there. The fact that more is being produced has nothing to do with what drives wages. What drives wages is the competition for labor. And the existence of unemployed people are going to keep that at subsist. Now, you may say, well. Surely it should be a little bit higher because they're going to be consuming more calories. They're going to die sooner if they were. Okay, so I've to, a little, a little bit, I've over-simplified it. But basically, they're going to be a subsistence. So capitalist B is, is going to out compete capitalist A, right? Because capitalist B is getting seven hours of surplus labor time out of his workforce whereas capitalist A is only getting six hours. So that means capitalist B can cut their prices out compete, sell cotton more cheaply and create problems for capitalist A, what's capitalist A going to do? >> Well, if he's being out, you know, produced he's probably going to try the same. >> He's going to try the same thing, right? So, of course, so what is going to happen over time I mean if you think about this. The working day is going to get as long as it can get. Now what's going to limit how long it is? >> How long the day is? >> Right. [LAUGH] Sun cycle. >> How, how, how long can people work for? >> Right, right. >> okay, so their physical limit, physiological limitations of workers right. You going to, they get, you work them to the bone eventually. You know, they just, you know, you, you, if you have, you ver, you start verging on slave labor your workforce will die. So there's physical limits. But Marx also thought there were political limits. He thought, what's going to happen? What's going to happen is workers are going to organize. They're going to try and get this stopped. They're going to form trade unions. They're going to form in Britain in the 19th century, the Chartist movement to demand workers' rights to limit this. Right? Because clearly if it's just the market, it's, they're going to be right to the edge of slave labor. Right? In a market economy. And so, it's no accident and I, this is why I chose ten hours as my benchmark. That one of the first regulations of the workplace was the Ten Hours Bill that was passed in Parliament. Which limited the working day to ten hours, by law. Okay. So you, you know, this is the result of, as I said, early political organizing. The beginning of what would become trade union movements later and so on. So. Capitalists can compete by lengthening the working day. But there are obvious limits, okay. And, and this is the dynamic of primitive competition, right? But, but these, these workers are going to be out there making demands and making trouble, and pushing for the state to step in. And limit the extent to which they can be exploited in that way. And so we but we capitalists are pretty much going to run up against the absolute physiological limits and the political limits of the working day, but so then you might say well. Okay, capitalists, by their nature, try to be innovative, to be ingenuous, somebody else is going to want to come and get in to the cotton industry. And if you can't produce your wage bill, any more or cover your wage bill you can't push their wages down. You can't make them work for less. And you can't make them work for longer. How can you be more competitive? What can you do? >> You introduce machines. >> Machines. Okay. So, this is exactly what happens. Okay? And this is the real dynamic once you get beyond the most primitive stages of capitalism. If I am in the cotton industry and I go out and buy a spinning jenny it's a machine. I can make my workers much more productive. Machinery technical innovation the point of it is to make labor more productive. So again these are always simplified numbers. A spinning Jenny would actually cover your wage bill a lot quicker but let's just keep it straightforward for now. I now can if again let's assume the status quo was A, the workings in, is, is, he's covering his wage billing for a ten hour day. Which is say set by law tenhours. Put in the machine and now that capitalist can cover his wage bill in three hours instead of four. >> Mm-hm. >> Okay, so we have three hours of surplus, of necessary labor time and seven hours of surplus labor time. Okay. So the la, the capitalist puts in the spinning Jenny. Covers his wage bell in three hours instead of four, and what do you know? He's, he's out competing all the other capitalists again, right? What are the other capitalist going to do? >> Again the same thing. >> They all have to go out and buy a spinning Jenny, right? And so that is the. Why capitalism is the most productive system in the history of the world. Because it creates this inbuilt necessity of innovation for what Joseph Schumpeter would later call creative destruction. That you're always going to have to find a new innovation to make labor more productive by deploying capital to buy machinery. Okay? So, an important thing to realize about this is that means production's going to become more and more capital-intensive over time, right? You, your capitalist is going to be spending a bigger portion of their capital on what we talked about last time as constant capital and a smaller proportion on variable, variable capital. Constant capital is the capital spent on plant, equipment, all of that. Variable capital is the capital spent on wages. Okay? I'll come back to the significance of that in a few minutes. But that is why capitalism becomes an ever more efficient and productive system. And can, can create the kind of super abundance of wealth eventually that will make socialism possible. Okay. So that is the micro story and that is how capitalism works. What I want to do now is zoom out from this transaction to the macro story. >> Mm-hm. >> And we'll see how it is that for a time this makes capitalism productive. But once everybody's put in their spinning Jennies and the next innovation and the next innovation and the next innovation, it eventually starts to become unproductive.